Enterprise content management (ECM) generally refers to a dynamic combination of strategies, methods, and tools (collectively referred to herein as the “ECM technology”) used to capture, manage, store, preserve (archive), and deliver information supporting a company, organization, or enterprise's processes throughout the information's lifecycle (e.g., from creation to deletion or destruction). The ECM technology can be utilized to organize all the content that gets used and distributed in an enterprise (referred to herein as “enterprise content”). In this case, “enterprise content” can be documents, files, images, audios, videos, emails, drawings, and any other unstructured enterprise-owned and/or related information (collectively referred to herein as “content”).
While content can be stored in files on an enterprise's network drive or file system in the enterprise's network (e.g., an Intranet or a secure private network), increasingly, content repositories are used. A content repository refers to a computer storage in which an aggregation of data is kept and maintained in an organized way. The ECM technology can be used to sort, control (e.g., regulate), manage, label, route, and locate content stored in such repositories. An ECM solution refers to a particular way the ECM technology is implemented to make content searchable, manage version control, perform routing and workflows, etc.
An example of an ECM solution can be Documentum™, available from OpenText™, which is headquartered in Canada. This ECM solution provides a rich set of out-of-the-box (OOTB) content services for enterprise users to access content servers, content repositories, or the like through REST application programming interfaces (APIs).
REST defines a set of architectural principles by which Web services can be created to focus on a system's resources, including how resource states are addressed and transferred over Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) by a wide range of clients written in different languages. An ECM solution can include a REST extension software development kit (SDK) that provides application developers/designers with the extension point to add custom resources, disable OOTB resources, or override OOTB resources in their custom ECM applications (collectively referred to herein as “extension applications”) that utilize content repositories on the server side.
An example of REST extension methods and apparatus can be found in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2016/0308949 A1 and Chinese Patent Publication No. CN106156932A, both of which are incorporated by reference herein. Examples of extension applications can include OpenText Documentum D2, OpenText Capital Projects Solutions, etc.